Laboratory Exercise No. 1
The DOS Environment
I. Introduction
Learning the DOS environment is essential to the development of assembly
programs. Before Windows operating system dominated the personal computers, Disk
Operating System (DOS) had been widely used. Familiarization with the DOS commands
is needed to debug and successfully run programs written in assembly language.
II. Objectives:
At the end of the laboratory session, the students should be able to:
1. Understand the functionalities of the different components of a computer system
2. Analyze the relationship of hardware components to instruction processing
III. Activity
1. From your Windows desktop, go to the DOS environment by either
- pressing Windows key+R and type CMD then press the Enter key or click OK,
or
- clicking Windows> All Programs> Accessories> Command Prompt
A window like this will pop up. This is the DOS environment.
From this window, note that mouse is disabled and the keyboard is the only means of
input. Commands are issued by typing on the command prompt. This is what command
line interface is all about.
2. Some examples of internal commands are:
• DIR
• CLS
• PATH
• A:
• TYPE
• MD
• CD
• RD
•DEL
• REN
• COPY
• VER
